Cleric offers reward for killing of cartoonist

A Pakistani cleric today offered 1.5m rupees (£9,600) and a car as a reward to anyone who killed the cartoonist who drew images of the prophet Muhammad.

Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, a prayer leader at the Mohabat Khan mosque in Peshawar, made the announcement to a 1,000-strong crowd outside the mosque after Friday prayers.

"This is a unanimous decision by all imams that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed, and whoever will take this insulting man to his end will get this prize," he said.

It was unclear which of the cartoonists who contributed drawings to Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper was being targeted by Mr Qureshi.

Sirajul Haq, a senior minister in the provincial government - run by a hardline Muslim coalition - said the government should demand the extradition of the cartoonist and put him on trial in Pakistan.

The crowd burned a Danish flag and an effigy of the country's prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Other clerics also condemned the cartoons, one of which shows Muhammad wearing a turban with a bomb poking out of it.

"Oh God, please punish those who dared to publish these sacrilegious cartoons ... give enough power to the Muslim countries and enable them to take revenge," Qari Saeed Ullah, a prayer leader in Islamabad, said.

Elsewhere in Pakistan and across the wider Muslim world, Friday prayers saw a resurgence of demonstrations against the images, which were originally published in September last year.

Thousands of Pakistani security forces were deployed across the country after five people were killed and western businesses attacked this week.

Police in Karachi fired teargas and swung batons to disperse 2,000 protesters blocking the main road into the city, police official Alim Jafari said.

In Multan, in Punjab province, security forces arrested 125 demonstrators for violating a ban on protests imposed in the east of the country following the violence.

They also placed, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, an Islamist cleric, under house arrest. Mr Saeed, the chief of the radical Jamaat al-Dawat group, became the first religious leader to be detained since the protests began.

He formerly led Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a group closely associated with Jamaat al-Dawat and banned by the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, four years ago.

The chief of police in Lahore said 12,000 police and an unspecified number of paramilitary troops were guarding government buildings, foreign businesses, mosques, shopping centres, restaurants, cinemas and bus stops.

"There is a ban on rallies, and we will not allow anyone to violate the ban," Khawaja Khalid Farooq said.

Witnesses said more than 5,000 protesters had gathered in the south-western city of Quetta.

The former US president Bill Clinton criticised the cartoons, but said the violent demonstrations meant Muslims had wasted an opportunity to build better ties with the west.

"I can tell you most people in the United States deeply respect Islam ... and most people in Europe do," Mr Clinton said.

He was visiting Islamabad as a representative of his charitable foundation to sign an agreement on an HIV-Aids project with the Pakistani government.

Meanwhile, around 500 Muslims in Bangladesh rallied in the Dhaka, while some 2,000 people gathered in Hong Kong to shout slogans and wave banners.

In Malaysia, around 3,000 people called for an international boycott of Danish products, while an effigy of George Bush was burnt.